Improving Continuing Education: The SimplePractice Learning Story

From its beginning, SimplePractice has been about making it easier for health and wellness professionals to run their practices, so that more focus can go where it belongs: Client care and even self care. We’re bringing that same philosophy to continuing education with SimplePractice Learning.

Continuing education is meant to keep health and wellness professionals current in our knowledge. In practice, though, it can be hard to find good content. Cheap courses—in both price and material—abound. While they deliver CE credit for license renewal, often that credit comes without much of the reason we’re supposed to take CE in the first place: actual learning. Conferences, on the other hand, often deliver both fantastic education and great networking opportunities. But they can be prohibitively expensive, especially when travel is involved.

Howard, the CEO of SimplePractice, came to me last year with a big, bold vision for how to change all that.

Reimagining continuing education: Quality over Quantity

Simply put, we want to make it easier to find great CE content. SimplePractice Learning is our new home for high-quality multimedia courses. We developed some of those courses ourselves, and some are from outstanding presenters we’ve partnered with all over the country.

We’re curating courses so that the most useful and engaging content gets the most attention. Over time, we’ll rely on reviews from course participants to determine which rise to the top.

Community feedback takes the guesswork out of CE

One of the biggest challenges in finding good CE content is that, with so many providers, it’s virtually impossible to know in a meaningful way whether a course is any good until you actually take the course. As our library grows, user reviews will make that task easier than ever. Courses with less than fantastic reviews will be revised or shelved. For courses where the reviews are fantastic, we’ll use that information to create future courses, doing more of what our customers tell us works. This cycle of quality means that our library will only get better over time.

My SimplePractice Learning story

I’m thrilled that this is happening, and not just because of my role in it. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that my role in it is because I’m thrilled that it’s happening. I’ve been in the therapist education world for a long time, having spent more than a decade as core faculty for Alliant International University. I’m also a licensed marriage and family therapist and a SimplePractice customer.

My professional work led me into therapist advocacy, where I’ve helped accomplish big, bold changes, even when others said those things couldn’t happen — things like banning reparative therapy for minors, and changing the title for prelicensed therapists in California. When I didn’t like the amount of time I spent in my Law & Ethics classes informing students of the letter of the law, I wrote a textbook.

In other words, big, bold solutions for therapists are kind of my jam. Getting to be part of one with the great team at SimplePractice is even better.